The Aye-voters agreed timetable for review of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. It is specified that the "Committee stage" to review the Bill, section by section, will take place on the floor of the House in a debate lasting no more than 5 hours. Normally this process takes place over a number of days in a small Standing Committee of MPs who have time to review the text carefully, but this is how it is done when time is short.

After this Committee stage debate, the final "Third reading" debate and vote (before the Bill is sent to the House of Lords) was ordered to take no more than one hour. If the Lords don't make any changes to the Bill, it becomes law as an Act of Parliament. Otherwise the MPs must review the changes the Lords have made and can choose to disagree with them. The Bill then goes back to the Lords, and these two steps are repeated until done, or the Parliament Act is cited.

The day for this Committee and Third reading process was scheduled through the "usual channels" on 28 February 2005, and the first vote on that day was to allow 6 hours for the debate.

About the Project

The Public Whip is a not-for-profit, open source website created in 2003 by Francis Irving and Julian
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